Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons^™

The Relationship Between Bilingualism, Cognitive Control, And Mind Wandering, Leah J. Shulley

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The unique linguistic experience of bilingualism purportedly produces cognitive control advantages. Although there is a significant body of evidence supporting this view, there are also several recently published research studies that failed to replicate bilingual advantages. Furthermore, there is some evidence of a publication bias that favors findings supporting a bilingual advantage. The purpose of this study was to address this discrepancy in the literature by examining performance of bilinguals and monolinguals on a variety of cognitive control tasks. A second purpose was to determine how bilinguals are able to achieve better performance if they do indeed have an advantage. …